The EPFL's Pac-Man Bot Can Snap Up Tiny Satellites

Clean Space One is here to gobble up SwissCube pellets.

By
John Wenz

Clean Space One isn't a catch-all space junk solution–that's as much of a political problem as it is an engineering one. But what it Clean Space One does do is clean up the mess created by the Swiss EPFL Center for Space Engineering's own satellites.

The EPFL has already launched some test probes called SwissCubes, which are basically their own version of the adorable CubeSat. But once the science payload of the mission is spent, it's nice to have a good way to de-orbit the satellites so they don't contribute to our growing space junk problem. The EPFL is building Clean Space One, which has a sort of octopus-like basket that swoops in and "swallows" the spent SwissCubes.

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The net will close around the target cube to keep it inside, though the team is working on ensuring that nothing bounces out before it has a chance to capture the cubes. Another challenge for this Pac-Man satellite is reflectiveness of SwissCubes; it's hard to nail the optics required to spot the small cube spacecraft. SwissCubes are only four cubic inches.

The EPFL team is calling the craft (which is currently in development) a "giant Pac-Man," and it could lead to new solutions to space junk related problems. The Clean Space One will (likely) launch in 2018. The whole system, SwissCube and Clean Space One, are intended to de-orbit after retrieval.